Digging with water instead of a bucket. It pays better than most Class A truck seats in this basin, and you can do it on a Class B...which makes it one of the shortest routes to good money out here. Every number below came off a posting we opened and read.
| Company | Where | Posted pay | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Badlands Energy Services | Watford City | $35–45/hr | Heavy equipment background |
| Preferred Energy | Williston | $32–37/hr | Class A or B + tanker |
| WISCO / Omni Environmental | Williston | $30–35/hr | Class B + tanker, 2 yrs |
| Martin Construction | Ross | $29–35/hr | Class A preferred, B acceptable |
Four postings, four employers, all read in full. Two more North Dakota hydrovac listings showed annual figures with cents attached, which is the signature of a job site's own salary model rather than a wage an employer typed. Those are not counted.
They get lumped together constantly and they are two different trades.
A vac truck hauls liquid. Produced water, tank bottoms, spills. You suck it up and you take it somewhere. Supervac is a vac truck too, not a hydrovac.
A hydrovac digs. High pressure water breaks the ground up and the vacuum lifts the slurry out. You are excavating...exposing buried pipe and cable, potholing, slot trenching...in places where putting a trackhoe in the ground would cut something expensive.
One is a hauling job. The other is an excavation job that happens to need a licence. The postings show it plainly: they ask for experience with excavators, dozers, loaders, backhoes and graders, and they talk about utility locators, traffic control and site investigation. That is construction language, not trucking language.
Here is the thing most hands out here do not realise.
Hydrovac runs on a Class B. One Williston employer requires a Class B with tanker and two years on it. Another accepts a Class A or B. A third says Class A preferred, Class B acceptable.
And it pays $29 to $45 an hour...which is more than winch truck, more than flat deck, and in the same country as crude hauling, all of which need a Class A.
A Class B is faster and cheaper to get than a Class A. If you are a swamper or a green hand deciding which school to pay for, that is worth sitting with. Everybody assumes an oilfield truck job means a Class A. This one does not, and it is one of the better paying seats in the basin.
Tanker endorsement does come up on most of these, because the truck carries the slurry it digs up. Get that with the B.
From the four descriptions, in their own words:
One employer states outright that driving is only about 10 to 15 percent of the job. The rest is operating the equipment and working the ground. Expect to sit, lift, stoop, bend, squat, kneel, reach and crawl, repeatedly, outdoors, in whatever the weather is doing.
One Williston employer requires you to relocate before starting work. Another offers a $2,000 sign on bonus and pays $2,000 for every qualified driver you refer. Ask about both...one costs you money and the other pays you.
All from postings we read, so you can compare like for like:
Crude pays more over a year. Everything else on that list pays less than hydrovac and asks for a harder licence.
Hydrovac needs a Class B, not a Class A. If you are starting from nothing, the swamper seat is how hands out here get into a truck without paying for school up front...and the B is the shorter road.
How Swampers Get Into A Truck →Four North Dakota hydrovac postings from four employers, every one opened and read in full, all live between April and August 2026. Company and town printed next to each number.
We report what a company posted. We do not grade it.
Two other North Dakota hydrovac listings carried annual ranges with cents attached. That is the signature of a job site's own salary model rather than a figure an employer typed, so we left them out. It is the same reason you should not trust a salary estimate anywhere else either.
Government baseline for context: the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the all occupations mean wage for the West North Dakota nonmetropolitan area at $29.27/hr (May 2023, OEWS). Every hydrovac posting we read starts at or above that.
We post a fresh North Dakota board every week, and we read the descriptions so you do not have to. Free.
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